Ichiban, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

Bento out of shape

Review published on 20/09/2002 © Sunday Herald

Two years ago I reviewed Ichiban in Glasgow's Queen Street and liked it. The newer Ichiban in Dumbarton Road needs a refresher course. The menu has become a mongrel. It speaks of compromises, of dishes tamed, altered or even created to talk down to people, not talk up to them.

The menu is of the modular type and straight off, it sounds a wrong note. There are the bento boxes, sushi and soups you might expect, but also discordant local offerings.

There are ''sauce-based'' dishes which, judging from the lurid picture, appear to be variations on meat, fish and vegetables served in a day-glo orange sauce looking suspiciously like that sugar/vinegar/colour concoction that comes with what we know as lemon chicken. Then there are ''curry-based'' dishes, described as ''Scotland's number one dish'' and looking rather reminiscent of the ''curries'' you get from the most basic Chinese takeaway. These sent me scouring the menu for dishes that seemed more in accord with its homage to Japanese food as ''the most nutritious food in the world'', though it was slightly disconcerting to read the menu waiver, ''some of our ingredients may contain genetically modified soya''. Why can't Ichiban stock Japanese brands of soy which come with a GM-free guarantee?

Apparently bento boxes sold on train stations in Japan contain over 20 items. Looking at our four sectioned tofu steak bento (£9.95), I couldn't see the commuters of Kyoto giving it the thumbs up, even with rice, miso soup and pickles. One quarter was occupied by a deadly boring British salad - iceberg, cucumber, tomato - and a dollop of what looked like mayonnaise and tasted like Heinz salad cream. The second quarter contained three workaday nigiri sushi with as much taste as Play-Doh except for a topping of something sweet and orange which seemed to be omelette. The tofu was in the third quarter, pleasant in that bland tofu way with mangetouts, courgettes and shiitake all in a pink, cloudy gluey sauce which tasted of chilli and not much else. In quarter four, there were reasonable gyoza dumplings, oily but acceptable. The best thing in the line-up was the savoury, warming miso soup.

Pan-fried seafood udon was a dog's dinner of udon noodles and beansprouts slicked in a sweet-sour sticky sauce, with one queen scallop, a few ribbons of totally taste-free squid and two spectacularly flavourless prawns thrown in. Bulking it out was ''crab stick'' and naruto - the mechanically-recovered meats of the marine world - which look like rubbery Edinburgh rock and taste like fishy spam. When you eat this kind of dish, Ichiban tastes like a restaurant that has succumbed to provincial second-rateness, the easy option of giving people what they know because it's commercial and there's no pressing need to trailblaze anything different. But consumers are getting more sophisticated. Restaurateurs need to respond before someone else comes along with a fresher, truer approach and leaves them behind.

My beef chilli soba soup, on the other hand, reminded me of the Ichiban I'd once liked. A really robust, chilli-hot broth, perfumed with Korean kim chee (that pickled cabbage that lends a pungent smoky flavour), concealed the firm grey buckwheat noodles.

Just balanced on the top, beside silky green spinach and seaweed, sat strips of a nicely seared sirloin, its pinkness just giving way to the heat of the stock. This came - as it would do in Asia - with raw beansprouts, lime and extra chilli on the side. Proof that Ichiban can still cook when it wants to.

Illustration: Adrian McMurchie www.amcmurchie.com